Janning's questions

This question is different from the one marked as duplicate as I know how to install Ubuntu on an USB Key but I want to have an additional partition on this USB Key

I have an USB 3.0 Stick with 64GB and I want to use it to save some backup data in an encrypted Partition but also have one partition with a bootable ubuntu.

Making a bootable ubuntu stick is easy:

# sudo dd if=ubuntu-16.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1k count=2048 conv=fdatasync

(changed sdd to sdX to prevent users from copying it and harm their system)

But then I get a strange partition table:

# fdisk -l /dev/sdd
Medium /dev/sdd: 58,4 GiB, 62746787840 Bytes, 122552320 Sektoren
Einheiten: sectors von 1 * 512 = 512 Bytes
Sektorengröße (logisch/physisch): 512 Bytes / 512 Bytes
I/O Größe (minimal/optimal): 512 Bytes / 512 Bytes
Typ der Medienbezeichnung: dos
Medienkennung: 0x15e2543d

Gerät      Boot Start    Ende Sektoren Größe Id Typ
/dev/sdd1  *        0 3035519  3035520  1,5G  0 Leer
/dev/sdd2       14432   19295     4864  2,4M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)

This seems to be correct as my stick is booting fine. But I really don't understand it.

When I partion the usb device before and have one FAT32 and one LUKS parttion then I still can dd the iso to the first partition /dev/sdd1 but it is not bootable anymore.

I set the bootable flag on the first partition of course an my laptop tries to boot it but only shows a blinking underscore.

There are so many misleading informations in the web about this scenario. I am lost. I am familiar with partitioning, and MBR and GRUB but only in using it. It seems I never really understood what is going on and many things have changed since I last did it (EFI, loop devices..)

It seems to be very difficult to use an USB stick as a bootable ubuntu AND as a backup partition. But I still think this should be a matter of

• Formatting and partitioning USB stick
• Copying ISO to partition
• Make some magic like MBR, bootable flag, Grub2

Can somebody help with a small step-by-step command line example to get things running on a modern ubuntu 16.04?

The second partition doesn't need to be mounted on Windows by the way.

I am trying to do some automatic installation and I need to run some commands as early as possible. So I modified my USB Installation medium (Ubuntu 16.04) and added:

menuentry "Install automatically" {
    set gfxpayload=keep
    linux   /casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/auto.seed preseed/early_command=/cdrom/early.sh boot=casper auto=true automatic-ubiquity debug-ubiquity  quiet splash ---
    initrd  /casper/initrd.lz
}

this is explained here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbiquityAutomation and here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopCDOptions

The file early.sh is on my USB stick as my auto.seed file (which is loaded just fine). But it seems my early.sh script is never run.

I just want to copy a file to the live system:

#!/bin/bash
cp /cdrom/wlan /root/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/wlan;
chmod 0600 /root/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/wlan;

I have prefixed it with /root as explained in the links above. I have even tried:

#!/bin/bash
touch /root/test

When I stop the installation before partman is running, I get the usual Live Desktop and I am expecting to open a console and see /root/test. But I don't.

I was looking at /var/log/syslog and I can see the boot parameters but no further log lines about early_command

My preseed file contains lines like this:

d-i preseed/early_command string in-target touch /root/test

How can I debug this situation? It is annoying to start over and over again.

After Kernel upgrade last week my lenovo x1 carbon 2015 fails to boot on first attempt (with nice graphics). It is configured with full disk encryption so I usually see a nice ubuntu screen with passphrase input.

Since last week I see just a black screen. When I switch to console with Ctrl-Alt-F1/F2.. I see mysterious thick white lines in the upper left corner.

When I power off and reboot I can then boot into ubuntu with a "failsafe" mode as it does not show nice graphics but just plain text to enter my passphrase. After this everything runs fine as usual.

I think it must be a graphics driver which doe not work and fails.

# lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Broadwell-U Integrated Graphics (rev 09)
# lshw -c video
  *-display               
       Beschreibung: VGA compatible controller
       Produkt: Broadwell-U Integrated Graphics
       Hersteller: Intel Corporation
       Physische ID: 2
       Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:00:02.0
       Version: 09
       Breite: 64 bits
       Takt: 33MHz
       Fähigkeiten: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       Konfiguration: driver=i915_bpo latency=0
       Ressourcen: irq:48 memory:f0000000-f0ffffff memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:3000(Größe=64)
# uname -a
Linux thinkpad 3.19.0-30-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Mon Sep 21 20:58:04 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I am runnng ubuntu 15.04

How can I fix this problem?

I just installed ubuntu 13.10 on a new x1 Carbon (second generation) and everything works fine so far. I adjusted the touchpad to disable "tap-to-click" and enabled "middle-mouse-button" and just fine tuning the touchpad (it is really bad in the default setup).

Now I have two problems left:

1. How can I make use of the function key bar? I can use F1-F12 just fine, but with "Fn" you should switch the OLEd to other keys. This does not work. Brightness/Settings/WLAN key does not work either.

2. How can I enable vertical scrolling with trackpoint and middle mouse button. On my lenovo T530 it worked out of the box.

I would like to use a softphone on my desktop. We have an telekom IP contract and they tell me it is possible to use any sip phone. I installed SFLPhone and tried to enter my credentials but it just fails.

I asked my provider, they told me the following:

SIP-ID/Benutzer: Ihre Telefonnummer 
Bildschirmname (falls vorhanden): Ihre Telefonnummer 
Authentifizierungs-Name / Benutzername: Ihre E-Mail-Adresse, z.B. "[email protected]" 
Passwort: Ihr Passwort
SIP-Proxy: tel.t-online.de 
Registrar: tel.t-online.de 
Realm: tel.t-online.de 
STUN-Server: stun.t-online.de 
Outbound-Proxy: leer lassen oder ebenfalls tel.t-online.de

I tried nearly every combination but I can't get connected. But I don't see why. I don't know where to put what.

Does somebody know how to debug sflphone (or other softphone on ubuntu) to see what fails exactly?

(or even better: does somebody know how to configure it with telekom IP contract?)

I have a fresh ubuntu 12.04 installation. When i connect to my remote server i got errors like this:

~$ ssh example.com sudo aptitude upgrade
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/apt-listchanges", line 33, in <module>
    from ALChacks import *
  File "/usr/share/apt-listchanges/ALChacks.py", line 32, in <module>
    sys.stderr.write(_("Can't set locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct!\n"))
NameError: name '_' is not defined
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_TIME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_MONETARY = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_ADDRESS = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_TELEPHONE = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_NAME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_MEASUREMENT = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_IDENTIFICATION = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_NUMERIC = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LC_PAPER = "de_DE.UTF-8",
    LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
No packages will be installed, upgraded, or removed.
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used.
...

I don't have this problem when i connect from an older ubuntu installation. This is output from my ubuntu 12.04 installation, LANG and LANGUAGE are set

$ locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=de_DE:en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Does anybody know what has changed in ubuntu to get this error message on remote servers?

I need these packages with the latest upstream version backported for ubuntu/natty

• libccid_1.4.5-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
• libpcsclite1_1.8.1-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
• libpcsclite-dev_1.8.1-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
• libusb-1.0-0_1.0.9-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
• libusb-1.0-0-dev_1.0.9-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb
• opensc_0.12.2-1ubuntu1ppa1~natty1_amd64.deb
• pcscd_1.8.1-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb pcsc-tools_1.4.18-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

I tried to build them from source with update but it failed. I am not an expert at packaging and there are so many tutorials and recipes out there.

Do you know a good and up to date tutorial for backporting Ubuntu packages?

How do I get packages from other releases without having to build them myself?

i run 11.04. i have a pdf file with an embedded logo (png file) and a few lines. The image has white background (really it is white, i checked with gimp and the color picker).

when i print the pdf file with the embedded printing gui from the "Document Viewer" the result is:

• image background is white
• lines are thicker than with lpr

when i print with lpr myfile.pdf i get

• image background is not white (its more like bisque (#FFE4C4))
• lines are as thin as they should be

As the P in PDF means "portable" i would like to know who things like this can happen? I always use the same printer.